Even after all these years I still struggle to understand how my grandmother, Becky, thought it was safe to send my mother, Olga, to London in April 1939. The threat of war between Britain and Germany had not receded in spite of Neville Chamberlain securing Adolf Hitler’s promise that he would not invade Europe further (Munich Agreement). Newspapers in Great Britain and Jamaica constantly referred to the threat of war. Whenever any member of the Browney family travelled to England, they always stayed with Becky’s sister, Martha, and Olga was no exception, although I think she wished she was! My mother didn’t like my Great Aunt Martha and described her a a bitter woman who lacked warmth and kindness – unlike her sisters Becky and Lucy. But I suppose Becky thought she’d be safe with Martha and, after all, it was only for six months.

Olga’s Diary (continued)

Dear Diary

Bad news: I’m in despair. Madame Verschaka’s School of Dance have written to me.

“We do not have a place available for six months, at which time we will be delighted to accept you as a pupil.”

That’s no good, I need a place now!

I told Aunt Martha and she said she couldn’t afford to keep me if I was going to remain in London. I don’t know what she means “she can’t afford to keep me” because I know Sydney gave her plenty of money to cover the cost of my stay, but she says there’s hardly any left because food is expensive and I eat a lot.

Well, honestly, I don’t think I do, but I didn’t dare argue with her. Thank goodness Sydney will be here soon, but I suppose I’ll have to go back to Jamaica with him. So far my visit has been disappointing and I haven’t enjoyed myself the way Birdie does when she comes to London.

Dear Diary

Fed up: Went to Trafalgar Square yesterday to feed the pigeons, but, I was in and out of that Square like a bullet.

I sat down and as soon as I pulled out my bag of breadcrumbs, pigeons surrounded me and started pecking at my paper bag trying to get the bread out and there were lots of them around my feet picking up the breadcrumbs – it felt like I was being attacked, so I dropped the breadcrumbs and ran.

Now I prefer to sit here on a bench in Regent’s Park and feed the little birds, they’re much gentler. Took my diary with me today so I could read again about my going away party in the Bournemouth Club, Kingston’s best night club.

It was a wonderful night with the club decorated with streamers and balloons and hanging from the ceiling, strung across the middle of the room was a whopping big sign.

“Goodbye Olga. We’ll miss you”. Wasn’t that nice?

There was a band and lots of food and all my friends and family laughing, joking, hugging and kissing me and giving me going away presents.

But the biggest shock that night came from Michael Sales. Michael was in the same class as me at AlphaAcademy and he was a holy terror. His favourite past time was putting a mirror under some of the girls’ skirts, including mine, so he could see what colour knickers we were wearing. He nearly got expelled once for doing it and it was only because his mother pleaded with the Headmistress to give him one more chance, that he wasn’t. Anyway, he must have learnt his lesson because he quietened down a lot and was much nicer because of it. As a matter of fact he went out with one of my best friends, Elise Ferguson, for a while.

But at my going away party he handed me a present with a card. Inside, was a pair of beautiful pearl ear-rings. No doubt about it, that is the nicest present I have ever received.

“Olga, when you come back, I want you to be my proper girl friend. I promise I will wait for you and I won’t go out with anyone else while you’re away” he said.

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think he liked me that much. Boys, don’t really, you know. They like to talk to me and tell me their problems with their girl friends, because they say I’m a good listener, but they never like me in a special way.

My friend, Carmen Cadoza, has boys buzzing round her like bees in a honey pot and, honestly, sometimes she treats the boys like they don’t exist. She says the secret of being successful with men is to play hard to get. Michael was going to be my first boyfriend. I wanted to cry I was so happy, but instead I gave him a little kiss on the cheek and said I would love to be his girlfriend and for a few minutes, I wondered, do I really want to go to England. But I dismissed the thought immediately because it would be something to look forward to when I come home.

On the same page is the holy picture of the Sacred Heart that Father Butler gave me when he came to say goodbye. He’d written on the back:

Dear Olga

Bon voyage and a happy stay in London.

Be a good girl and don’t forget to say your prayers.

God bless you,

Reading about that evening and how happy I was then and how miserable I am feeling now made me sad and homesick. I felt lonely sitting on that bench in the park. I was hugging my diary with both hands, my head buried in my chest and gently rocking back and forth and I wasn’t aware someone had sat down beside me.

“Are you alright”. I heard someone say.

When I looked up I saw a beautiful brown face smiling at me.

“My name’s Joanne” she said, smiling at me.

My spirits lifted immediately and we started talking. And guess where she came from….Jamaica!! I couldn’t believe it because there aren’t too many Jamaicans in London, I can tell you.

Joanne comes from a big family, just like me, and they live in St Ann’s Bay. We talked about our families and home and even though she’s been in London for two years studying nursing at Paddington GeneralHospital, Joanne still misses her family a lot.

I said I missed my friends and was lonely and whenever someone sits next to me on the park bench, like the nannies who push the babies in the prams, I always smile and say hello and hope that they will talk to me, but they don’t, they either pretend they haven’t heard me or get up and walk away.

“Thank goodness for the keepers in the zoo”.

“They’re friendly and they tell me all about the animals like elephants or the tigers and the bears” I said

“I like London a lot, but it can be the loneliest place in the world” Joanne told me.

Oh she’s really lovely. I’m so happy we met. Joanne has one more year’s training and then she’s going back to Jamaica to work. When I told her why I had come to London she was surprised and said didn’t my parents realise that England could go to war any day. I said that the Prime Minister had Hitler’s promise not to invade Europe any more, so Mammie and Sydney felt it was safe for me to come over, and, anyway, Sydney would be here soon and I’d be going back to Jamaica with him. Two hours later, and much happier, I said goodbye to Joanne, but we arranged to meet in the park the following week.

When I was a child my mother, Olga, used to tell me that her family practiced witchcraft (Obeah) in Jamaica, but I didn’t believe her. Being a good Catholic girl, I didn’t countenance such ‘mumbo jumbo’!

After Emancipation in 1834 the Government made Obeah illegal and it was hoped that it would be wiped out – but it just continued in secret, pretty much like when my mother was living in Jamaica in the 1920s and 1930s, and probably still continues today. It’s deep rooted in the black and coloured Jamaican’s heritage and culture and even though you might come across a family that is both Christian and well educated, the likelihood is that someone in it will be dabbling in Obeah, like my family!

She’s put a spell on him: Later Mammie told us why Sydney had stormed out of the house when he told us he was going to live with Aggie Burns. He called Mammie a hypocrite and said it was ok for her to live with a black man and cause huge misery and pain, not only for her parents, but also her sisters and children, of course, he meant Vivie and Aunt Martha.

Mammie replied that at least she and Pops had got married and anyway she didn’t think Aggie was the right person for him.

Sydney was in such a rage, Mammie said she was too frightened to say anything more to him. She told us that Sydney had been right about her objections to Aggie Burns because she was black.

“I experienced such hatred from people I never dreamt could behave in such an ugly manner and I don’t want any of my children to go through the treatment I received nor do I want Sydney’s children turning on him one day because of their colour.

“We’re not all prejudice like some of the others” dear Pearl told Mammie.

But Mammie’s convinced that Aggie Burns has put a spell on Sydney to make him fall in love with her. That’s the only explanation she says.

She’s the woman we go to for herbal remedies sometimes when we were ill. Well, as everyone knows, she also practises Obeah and Mammie wants Annie to work Obeah on Sydney to make him come home.

But I was worried about us going there because the punishment for practising Obeah is very harsh if you are caught by the police. It can be 20 lashes and a prison sentence of six months, with hard labour, if you are found guilty and even if you’re a woman.

I tried to talk Mammie out of it, but she was determined to go.

Annie Harvey makes quite an impression and is still a very striking woman in her white turban and red cloak. I was surprised when I saw her house, it’s rather nice, with a little white fence and pretty flowers in the garden. The sort of house I’d like myself one day. Anyway, Annie took us out to a shack in the backyard. Inside it was dark, and it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust before I could see properly. You couldn’t see a single bit of the ceiling because there were dried herbs hanging from it everywhere.

There were wooden shelves on one side of the room with different sized coloured bottles and some were full of liquid, but others only half full. I recognised some zinc powder and ingredients for making a “medicine bath” and poultices. There was also a tin of Epsom salts sitting on one of the shelves, which I thought strange, because we have that at home.

There was another shelf with some pimento leaves and pieces of logwood bark, bird feathers, broken egg shells and some ashes. Cassie told me later she saw a chicken’s foot and a lizard’s tail.

Mammie explained to Annie Harvey that she wanted Sydney to return to the family. He had deserted us in favour of a bad woman who was a danger to him.

“We wanted to protect him from this evil woman who has cast a spell on him and taken him away from us” said Mammie to Annie.

Annie Harvey left the shack for a minute and when she returned she was holding a bunch of green leaves which she put into a wooden bowl and with a small piece of wood, rounded at the end; then she pounded the leaves together until they turned into a thick green paste.

Then she sprinkled some ashes into the paste and from a small blue bottle around her neck she sprinkled just two drops of a dark brown liquid into the mixture and then mixed it up again. Each time she mixed the paste she talked in a strange language that none of us had heard before. She covered the paste with some muslin cloth and then wrapped it in brown paper and tied it up with string and told Mammie to put it in Sydney’s food and he would come home.

On the way home, Mammie said we were going to stop at the Holy Trinity Cathedral to offer prayers to Jesus to pray for Sydney’s return and when I asked why after having just come from the balm yard, she said she was covering all options.

When we got home Mammie said she was sure Cassie would tell Aggie Burns that she had been to Annie Harvey’s balm yard and worked Obeah on him.

“It won’t be long before Sydney comes homes, but, in the meantime, Olga, you’re going to have to put the paste into Sydney’s food.”. I knew it.

When Annie Harvey gave Mammie the paste, I thought to myself, guess who’s going to have to do that little job Olga”.

“I can’t do it, I’ll get caught” I told her.

“Choose your time, when he’s out, make a nice sandwich for him, his favourite, pork with apple and ginger. Spread the paste in between the slices of meat or mix it in with the apples.

Sydney was expecting a shipment of bicycles to arrive from London the next day and fortunately for me the paper work was not in order, so he had to spend hours down on the docks sorting it out so by the time he got back to the shop he was ravenously hungry. I produced the sandwiches each filled with thick juicy pieces of pork, sliced apple, ginger and the paste and he just gobbled the sandwiches and, obviously, never tasted anything unusual.

Mammie was so happy when I told her. Oh I do hope it works, with all our wages going into the household pot, we have hardly anything to spend on ourselves and Sydney has a whole heap of money, tons of it, he’s just being nasty by making us suffer.

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I regret I never met my Aunt Vivie but, unfortunately, she died just a couple of years before I made contact with Mum’s (Olga) family in Jamaica. I think I would have liked her even though there was one aspect of her character I would have struggled with. It does sound as if Vivie was a bit of a loose canon – a one off. She was tough and certainly not afraid to speak her mind, particularly to her older brother, Sydney, if she thought he was being too free with his belt when he chastised their younger siblings. In the 1930s Jamaican society was a mirror image of Great Britain replicating its prejudices and social morals. Women like my Aunt Vivie, who flew in the face of convention, were few and far between in an era that expected women to be seen and not heard.

Vivie was married, yet quite openly having an affair with another man, Freddie Howell; she helped run an illegal gambling house with Freddie and, according to Mum, had the threat of being excommunicated from the Catholic Church hanging over her head because of her relationship with him. If what people thought bothered her she didn’t show it.

What I wouldn’t have liked about my Aunt Vivie though was her racial prejudiced in spite of being coloured herself. This is something I struggle to understand. The colour of one’s skin was important to Vivie and, she had made it very clear to her mother, Becky, that she was angry with her for marrying a black man. She recognised that the white Jamaicans had social prestige, status and political power. And that they saw as inferior those whose colour ranged from almost white to pure black even though they may have been educated people with good jobs such as lawyers, doctors, business men or women, teachers, clergy, and skilled tradesmen.

Colour mattered and that mindset was demonstrated to me personally decades later. When I was in Jamaica in 1996, one of my cousins offered me a job running a franchise operation in Montego Bay that she was considering investing in. I asked her why she wanted me and didn’t do the job herself. Her reply was “because your skin is the right colour”. I was gobsmacked!

Carlton heard about what happened that Sunday in Church and there was a terrible row between Vivie and Carlton. She told Carlton she was leaving him. He begged her not to go and when she said it was all over between them and she didn’t love him any more, he started to cry and pleaded with her to give him another chance. Vivie told him that she was taking their children and going to live with Freddie. She said he suddenly stopped crying then and there was silence, except for the sound of a clock ticking somewhere in the house.

Carlton didn’t say anything for ages but just kept looking at her. Then he shrugged his shoulders a little, as if to say, “ok, you win” and, without a word, left the house. Vivie said she thought he was going to find Freddie to punch him on the nose but she wasn’t worried about Freddie because he could take care of himself.

Carlton and Vivie had a whirlwind romance. Within weeks of meeting they went off to Montego Bay and got married without telling any of the family, except for Cissie and Dyke who were their witnesses at the wedding. Sydney said if Vivie hadn’t been so desperate to marry a white man she’d have saved both families a lot of heart ache and realised that charm, good looks and receiving a small allowance from his parents was not enough to support a family.

Sometime during the afternoon on the day following the big row, Carlton’s body was found by some people out walking in a valley in the Blue Mountains. It appears his car went over a precipice just past the army post at Newcastle and his body flung from the car. He’d been dead for hours and to this day no one ever really knew if it was suicide or an accident.

I was grateful that I was asked to look after the children in the family so Chickie, Boysie and Cissie could go to the funeral. Carlton’s coffin was left open for mourners to pay their last respects and I didn’t want my last sight of Carlton to be lying dead in a coffin. I wanted to remember him how I always saw him – full of life and laughing.

If I had been married to Carlton I wouldn’t have minded Carlton being a poor white man because he had other qualities. Tall, fair-haired, very good looking, funny, nice to talk to, always joking. Women were very attracted to him and I think it’s easy to see why Vivie fell in love with him. They met when he was playing tennis at the Myrtle Bank Hotel and Vivie said the first thing she noticed about him was that his legs were better than hers. He was always invited to the best clubs, parties and social events in Kingston and he may not have had much money of his own but people liked him, because he was nice, and he was friends with all sorts of people. What made him different from other white Jamaicans was that he wasn’t prejudice towards coloured or black people in the slightest.

The day of Carlton’s funeral was unusually hot for that time of the year and there was a cloudless sky and not a breath of wind in the air. A black choir sang hymns at his funeral and Dolly told me later that this was Carlton’s “second family”.

As a baby Carlton had a black nurse whose name was Ambrosine Williams and he spent much of his childhood with her and her thirteen children rather than his own white family. When his coffin was being lowered into the ground Ambrosine Williams bent down and picked up a handful of earth and threw it at Vivie. She told Vivie that she was going to set a duppy on her for causing Carlton’s death and that she would be cursed until the day she died.

That night the wind began to pick up and get stronger and continued until well into the evening. Then, according to a report in the paper “the lightening started building up in strength until it lit up the whole sky, dancing in fantastic forms in the night sky, whilst the thunder that followed the lightening seemed to shake the earth as if to say the end of the world is near and then finally in the early hours of the next morning the rain came down.”

Big Scandal:My very favourite nun, Sister Marie-Thérèse, told me one day when I was at AlphaAcademy, that Jamaica has the largest number of churches per square mile in the entire world.Many are beautiful, old, stone buildings going back to the 1800s.Religion has always been important to Jamaicans and especially to my family.Mammie says we are high Catholics, which I think makes us sound special, but to be honest, I don’t know what the difference is between a high Catholic and a low one.It’s one of those questions I don’t like to ask in case people think I’m stupid.

We always put on our best Sunday clothes when we go to mass.Mammie says how we dress is important because clothes say a lot about you.Ragged clothes are a sign of poverty but even the poorest person wouldn’t dream of going to church without putting their best clothes on, clean shoes and a proper hat, and not a scarf, because that doesn’t cover your head properly.Mammie is very particular about us all looking clean and smart and when we were at school she would keep us away rather than send any of us off without clean, ironed school uniforms.In Jamaica being well dressed is a sign of your social status and it’s important to your sense of self respect and self worth, Mammie says.

Going to church is a social occasion and after mass, standing around outside the Church, you can catch up on all the gossip.Unfortunately, quite a lot of it has been about the Browneys lately so we haven’t hung around for too long.

Whit Sunday:My sisters Dolly, Ruby, Pearl and I had decided to go to an early mass so that afterwards we could catch a boat to Port Royal and spend the day on the beach and swim and have a picnic.We had just returned to our pew after receiving Holy Communion when I was aware of a click-clacking sound coming from behind me and turned round to see what it was.It was coming from Vivie and her silver dance shoes.I couldn’t believe my eyes.There she was, still wearing the tight, low cut red dress she had bought to go to Freddie Howell’s birthday party the previous night.On her head was a small scarf which didn’t quite cover her newly bleached blonde hair.

“Is it a wig” Dolly whispered to me?

Vivie must have been aware of the stir she was causing in the Church, but, her faith is as important to her as it is to the rest of us and she knew that even if the congregation and God judged her to be a sinner, God, at least, would forgive her.

All eyes were on her and at the same time varying commotions erupted around the Church.There were plenty of gasps from onlookers as she click clacked down the aisle towards the altar rail.Some people were whispering, quite a few were muttering loudly and some distinct words could be heard…… “common, trash, looks like a whore”…… and some whose mouths were opened in astonishment.

Vivie and her shoes click clacked their way down the aisle heading straight for the altar rail.She knelt down and waited to receive Communion from Father Butler.He had seen Vivie approaching and was aware of the stir she was causing in the Church.

Father Butler told Mammie later that before he reached Vivie he had decided what he was going to do.And he did it.In front of hundreds of people he walked straight past her without giving her Holy Communion.

It was a slight of monumental proportions, and by now you could have heard a pin drop because there was total silence in the cathedral.and for what seemed like forever Vivie remained on her own kneeling at the altar rail.

Then she stood up and turned to face the congregation.She looked around at the faces in front of her, lifted her hand and slowly removed the scarf.That one defiant gesture, or it may have been the sight of the blonde hair, caused the entire congregation to act together and they gasped.

Vivie then calmly walked out of the Church.

Father Frank Butler was a newly ordained priest when he came to Kingston from Ireland shortly after the Great Exhibition in 1891 which, apparently, was Jamaica’s way of telling the rest of the world what a lot of opportunities there were here.

Although Father Butler’s very old now, he’s still a big man and fat.He says he’s not fat but “well nourished” and he’s got white hair and a very weather beaten complexion from too much sun.

He’s taken part in most of the important religious occasions to do with the Browneys – when we were baptised, our first Holy Communion, our confirmation and our confessions.He probably knows more about all of us than either Mammie or Sydney.

I was never very happy when he heard my confession on a Friday evening because he and Sydney are good friends and every Sunday night Father Butler comes to Mission House to see Sydney and the pair of them would sit for hours talking and smoking smelly cigars in the upstairs drawing room every Sunday night.

For a long time I was frightened that Father Butler would tell Sydney about the sins I’d confessed to and I’d get a whipping, but Mammie told me that a priest has to take an oath of silence and can never repeat anything to anyone else that he hears in the confessional box even if he was asked to by a judge in a court of law.

In the beginning Father Butler called on us for donations, either money or clothes which we had grown out of and he’d give to the St Vincent de Paul Society which helps the poor people of Kingston.

Priests are important to Jamaican families because if a family has no money they will always go to their priest for help and they will always receive a few pence for food and clothes.But things have to be really awful if you have to go to the priest and ask for money.

Anyway, this Sunday, Mammie didn’t attend mass that particular morning and, Sydney was away up country on business, so missed the incident in Church, but Father Butler told Mammie later what had happened and said he was concerned about Vivie’s “moral welfare”.Having an affair with a married man and committing adultery are mortal sins and were forbidden by the Catholic Church and if Vivie continued on her wayward journey to damnation, he would have to have her excommunicated from the Church.Most Catholics I know would say that being put in front of a firing squad was better than being excommunicated from the Church.

Mammie tried to explain that Vivie was going to ask Carlton for a divorce because she wanted to marry Freddie.

“You know as well as I do Becky, the Catholic Church does not recognise divorce and will never allow Vivie to marry Freddie”.But worse was to come……………………

Up until I was about 12 my Mum, Olga, (although at the time I knew her as Carmen) and I shared a bed.It was when I snuggled up to her at night that sometimes she would talk about some of her family, particularly her mother whom she adored.My grandmother had thrown Henry out of the house because of his womanising, gambling and drinking. That must have been when Mum was very young because once she told me that for a long time, when she was little, she thought Sydney was her father.

Mum talked about Sydney, but never fondly.She hated him because of the beatings he gave her. Sydney died in 1980and, to be honest, I’m glad I never met him – I know I wouldn’t have liked him.For me, there’s something insidious about a man who can beat his sisters and feel it is justified – the girls weren’t bad, just boisterous.

But, the more I learnt about my family, the more I wished I’d tried to find them years earlier than I did.

Olga’s Diary (Continued)

Dear Diary

Viviana:She’s my oldest sister but everyone calls her Vivie and she’s fearless.She’s my heroine because she is always prepared to speak up, usually against Sydney, for the “tots” which is the pet name the family use when they’re talking about Ruby, Dolly, Pearl and me.

At one time we had a lodger called Alfred Moncrieff, a coloured man from Clarendon.I didn’t like Mr Moncrieff one little bit and one day he told me to collect his dirty laundry from his room and give it to Cassie to wash and I turned my back on him, tossed my head in the air and at the same time flicked the back of my skirt in a haughty manner (I saw Jean Harlow do this once in a film) and told him I wasn’t a servant.

That night, when Ruby and I were in bed asleep, Sydney came into our bedroom and dragged me out of bed and gave me a whipping.Mr Moncrieff had told him I had lifted my skirt right up and shown him my knickers.It was a lie.

When Vivie heard what had happened she tore into Sydney something terrible.She was fearless and told him that there was something unnatural about a brother giving his sister a whipping on the bottom and that he should be ashamed of himself.

“You’re too free with your hands on the tots” she told Sydney.

“How could you believe that nasty little man with his dirty little mind and not even ask Olga her side of the story before you dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night”.

She called him cruel, a bully and said “you’re just as bad as Moncrieff “.

I can tell you Sydney’s not used to being spoken to like that. As a matter of fact the whole family was very angry about what Sydney did to me but he’s taken over the role of head of the family now and that’s that.I don’t know whether Mammie ever said anything to Sydney about the whipping he gave me, but the next day she told Moncrieff to get out.

Vivie is going out with Freddie Howell even though she’s still married to Carlton Puyatt.Freddie is a very rich white man, who by the way, is also married and has two children.Vivie wants a divorce from Carlton because she is in love with Freddie who owns a gambling club on Harbour Street.Freddie’s partner is Roy Mackenzie who is also white and comes from a very rich, prominent, white family who own three plantations, one of which is near Aunt Lucy’s. Roy’s really nice looking and a bit of a rogue but the ladies love him.I like him quite a lot myself but he doesn’t even know I exist.Boysie says one day Roy will be even richer than his father because he never misses an opportunity to make money and no matter how much money he earns, it’s never enough.

Gambling is very popular in Kingston, particularly the Chinese numbers game, peaka pow although it’s illegal, but, as with everything else that‘s illegal in Jamaica, everyone does..Every now and again the Gleaner newspaper and the Church elders get all hot and bothered about the gambling that goes on and Freddie’s club always comes in for a lot of attention.

The Den of Inquity

The Church elders call it a den of inequity and Freddie thought the description amusing so that’s what he named his club.The elders wanted the police to close it down, but Freddie has friends in high places and the police tip him off when they’re going to raid the club.Then he closes it down for a while and re-opens three or four weeks later.Every Saturday night Vivie cooks a special meal for the gamblers, something like chicken with rice and peas or cod fish and ackee and I often go there during the day to help her with the cooking.

Sometimes Freddie lets me stay on in the evening helping in the cloakroom. Freddie says I’m never to tell anyone who I see coming into the club otherwise I won’t be allowed to help any more.I never realised how popular Freddie’s club was with so many well known men and women from Kingston and you’d be amazed how much private entertaining is done in the upstairs rooms by members of the government, famous actors and a lot of Jamaica’s white and coloured high society.

Sydney:Sydney was Mammie’s first child.As soon as he was born the gossip started up again about Mammie because, would you believe it, by a fluke of nature, he was more white than coloured.That set tongues wagging about Mammie even more.But she didn’t care what people were saying.She loved her baby and she loved Pops and went on to have ten more children, all coloured, except Pearl who, like Sydney was more white than coloured.

From an early age Sydney was always determined to be successful and at 14 he started a bicycle repair business from our back yard.He attached a wooden cart to the back of his bicycle and cycle around Kingston asking people if they had any old bicycles they didn’t want or were too battered to repair.Sydney did so well he had to hire someone to help him and it wasn’t long before he bought his first shop and gave people the chance to buy a new bicycle making a small payment each week.To keep up with the demand for bicycles Sydney regularly goes to England now.At the same time he needed a partner in the business, someone he could trust, so he asked Boysie to become his partner and, of course, he agreed.

Mammie taught us all to follow her example of being proud, polite, to act with dignity and not do anything that we would be ashamed of.Her favourite phrase is “civility costs nothing”.Sydney says following Mammie’s example is the reason he is a successful businessman and people respect him.

Vivie says it’s because he’s more white than coloured.Unfortunately for Vivie she was born more coloured than white.I say unfortunately because Vivie desperately wants to be white and although she loves Mammie, has always been angry with her for marrying a black man.

Sometimes I think she is more colour prejudice than anyone else I know and I’m not sure how our lives would have been better if Mammie had married a white man.But Vivie says we’re all prejudice because all our friends are either white or coloured.

“How many black people are our neighbours or friends or we even know”?

“How many black pupils went to AlphaAcademy”?

Of course, none of us have any black friends and black pupils go to other schools, not Alpha – as a matter of fact the only black people I know are our servants, and of course, Pops.But we know lots of Chinese people.There’s a Chinese shopkeeper next door and as a matter of fact nearly all the shopkeepers are Chinese.

“Well, they’re not black” says Vivie always determined to have the last word.

Sydney is very protective of Mammie.He says he saw for himself when he was a small boy how unkindly she was treated because of her marriage to Pops.I can never remember a time when Pops lived with us, and for a long time when I was growing up I thought Sydney was my father.He always told us what to do and whipped us when he thought we were doing something wrong.We tots used to ask why Mammie didn’t stop him and I think it’s because she was scared Sydney would leave and there would be no money coming in.My older sisters say Pops would never have beaten any of us no matter how naughty we were.

Mum’s writing started back in Jamaica.Her oldest sister, Vivie (Viviana) gave her a green diary that had a little gold lock on it and came with its own special key.

Growing up I remember so well how my Mum, Olga, loved to write. She’d write her stories in school exercise books – simple romantic stories – boy meets girl, they fall in love, marry and live happily every after. Just the backgrounds changed. Mum liked to read the same type of stories that she wrote. In the 1950s there were weekly women’s magazines, like Red Letter and Secrets and others that were filled with these romantic tales. Mum loved reading them and invariably had three or four magazines on the go.

Dear Diary

My First Entry: Jamaicans love big families and the Browneys are no exception. There are thirteen of us including Mammie and Pops. Now only my mother, Mammie, my brother Sydney, me and my sisters Ruby, Dolly and Pearl live in Mission House.

That’s what our house is called and it’s in the same grounds as the Wesleyan Church. It’s quite grand, imposing and very big. At the front of the house there’s a huge old cotton tree which always looks to me as if it is standing guard over us. But the tree does more than that, it keeps the house cool and dry protecting us from the heat and humidity in the summer. The house is red bricked and square, with green shutters at all the windows, which are kept open all the time, except when a hurricane is due. Everyone says the best thing about our house is the upstairs verandas at the front and back because from the front you can see the Caribbean Sea and from the back you can see the Blue Mountains.

Downstairs there is another drawing room, three more bedrooms, a dining room, the kitchen, a pantry and a storeroom. Outside a veranda made from cedar wood surrounds the entire ground floor of the house and out the back is a yard with a big cooking range under a lean to, a bath house, a water closet and, of course, our lovely garden.

Upstairs there are three very large bedrooms, one smaller one and a drawing room. I share one of the bedrooms with my sister, Ruby. Ruby is the most studious and brightest of the younger sisters and loves reading and writing. In secret she writes short stories which she reads to me when we are in bed. I feel very honoured because Ruby doesn’t read her stories to anyone else in the family, just me. Quite often they’re romances where the heroine is a simple country girl who falls in love with the son of a rich landowner and he loves her but his father forbids him to have anything to do with her because she’s not good enough for him, so they don’t see each other any more. But the son can’t bear it and they run off together, get married and live happily every after. That’s why I like Ruby’s stories, they always have a happy ending.

My two other sisters, Dolly and Pearl, share another bedroom. Dolly and Pearl couldn’t be more different. Pearl is quiet and thoughtful and very sweet, so is Dolly, but she is a younger version of my older sister, Vivie, lively and outspoken.

Then there’s my older brother, Sydney. Sydney is married but he and his wife, Janetha, have been separated for years and he lives with us now.

I have another brother, Boysie, whom I adore because he is always laughing and is so much fun to be with. He’s happily married to Minah and even though he has his own family he still finds time to visit us. We all go to Boysie with our problems, never Sydney. I like Minah, she’s nice, but I must admit some of the family don’t like her because she’s Jewish. She’s very pretty with long black straight hair and is quite dark skinned. They have four children and have a very nice house nearby in Duke Street and we’re always in and out of each other’s homes.

One of my older sisters, Birdie, is in London at the moment studying dancing at Madame Verschuka’s School of Dance. This is her second trip to London and Vivie’s been as well and I’m hoping to go soon too. Mammie has a sister, Martha, who lives in Paddington and when ever any of the family goes to England, we stay with Aunt Martha. Birdie says she’s an old trout and doesn’t like her.

I have another older sister, Cissie, who is married to Dyke and they too have four children. They have a coffee plantation in Montego Bay and have been married for about five years. Dyke is lovely. Mammie calls him a gentle giant because he towers over everyone including Sydney. We don’t see much of them at all really, except at family gatherings at Christmas time, or when there’s an occasion, like a wedding or a funeral, or a family crisis.

My Pops doesn’t live with us now, so Sydney is head of the house and supports the family financially. At school I was always top of my class in arithmetic, and when I left Sydney told Mammie he wanted me to work for him in the shop and keep the books in order. I didn’t want the job; what I wanted to do was go to England but Mammie asked me to take the job, so I did.

Sydney says Mission House is far too big to maintain and now there are not so many people living here, we should move to a smaller house. Mammie says he’s right but it’s difficult for her to make the move. Too many memories, she says, good ones and some bad, so for now we’re staying put.

We have two servants, our maid Cassie who’s nearly the same age as me and I like a lot, and our cook, Aggie Burns, who gives me the creeps. One day Sydney decided that Mammie needed help so off he went to find someone and came back with Aggie. But she’s a crazy woman. She believes in Obeah and comes to work some mornings and tells me about great big peacocks that come to her front door and talk to her. Mammie says to ignore her and not upset her because she’s the best cook we’ve ever had.

When I visited my family in Jamaica in 1996 only six of Mum’s siblings were still alive.Boysie, Birdie, Pearl, Chickie (christened Kathleen), Ruby and Dolly.Boysie was living in Canada and I never got to meet him, although Mum spoke to him on the phone.

It was wonderful to finally meet some of Mum’s family – my extended family, the family that as a child I’d always longed for but which, in the main, Mum didn’t like to talk about.She’d say, “it makes me sad”.But ironically, when she was sad, that was when she’d open up a bit and I gleaned little bits of information about her family.I knew that as small children Mum, Ruby and Dolly had been very close and it was interesting to see just how much Ruby and Dolly looked like Mum, as well as being a bit unnerving.

Although I’d warned my aunts before I left the UK that Mum wouldn’t be coming with me to Kingston because she had serious health problems, I think a little bit of them was hoping she would appear at the last minute.But her non appearance didn’t diminish in anyway the reception they gave me.They had thrown a “Welcome Home” party for me attended by their children – my cousins – and family and their friends.It was all a bit overwhelming really.I was so glad my son Stuart had come with me. My aunts made a great fuss of Stuart too and it took some of the pressure of me.

My aunts made a huge fuss of me and were genuinely excited to meet Olga’s daughter. They were so excited, like small children, constantly chattering and interrupting each other so they could speak to me, hugging me and always one of them holding my hand.They’d ask me over and over again “How is Olga?”.“Why didn’t Olga let us know she was alive”?It was strange to hear Mum being called Olga, because I’d only every known her as Carmen.When I asked them why she changed her name from Olga to Carmen, they said they had no idea.She was always Olga to them.I was to find out the answer to that one later.

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Why I Wrote ”Olga – A Daughter’s Tale”

In 1994, my mother, Carmen Browne, was admitted to the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton in the UK seriously ill. As she slowly recovered I realized that had she died so too would the chance of my finding out about her past, her family in Jamaica and, of particular importance to me, who my father was information she had consistently refused to share with me. So I decided to find out for myself.

My first discovery was that my mother’s real name was Olga Browney, born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and one of eleven children from a close-knit, coloured Catholic family. A kind, naïve and gentle girl, my mother arrived in London in 1939 and lived with a malevolent, alcoholic aunt, intending to stay for only six months. However, world events, personal tragedy and malicious intent all combined to prevent her from returning home to Kingston.

"Olga - A Daughter's Tale" is based on a true story about cruelty, revenge and jealousy inflicted on an innocent young woman and about moral courage, dignity, resilience and, in particular, love. It is the story of a remarkable woman, who because of circumstances, made a choice, which resulted in her losing contact with her beloved family in Jamaica, until nearly half a century later, when her past caught up her.

What I discovered about my mother filled me with such admiration for her that I wanted her story recorded for future generations of my family to read so that they would know about this remarkable woman whose greatest gift to me was her unconditional love. That's why I wrote “Olga – A Daughter’s Tale”.